For the past 20+ years, I’ve been holding onto this uniqueness of me that I feel right now is the time to share it and use my path in life in a positive way. As a pre-teen, I was diagnosed with Alopecia Areata, which was one of the hardest things that has ever happened to me. I knew waking up with clumps of hair on my pillow wasn’t normal, and I knew the process of brushing your hair shouldn’t be terrifying, but to have a name to it was emotionally hard.

Alopecia Areata is “an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks its own healthy hair follicles, causing hair loss on the scalp, face and sometimes on other areas of the body.” So my body sees healthy hair growing on my body and thinks “ATTACK OR THE WHOLE SHIP WILL BE DESTROYED” whereas in a person without Alopecia the body thinks “Oh cool look at that hair growing and doing its thing, I’m gonna go over here and do something else.” There are roughly 400,000 people diagnosed with Alopecia, which is about .05% of the population.

For the years after my diagnosis, I went through a range of treatments. Nothing seemed to work for a long period of time, and my hair just kept falling out. At one point, I faced the fact that no matter what I tried, I was not getting my hair back.

Realizing I was going to be bald was hard; it brought on emotional events that have scarred to me this day, has given me moderate level depression, and high level social anxiety which impacts me every day. There have been traumatic events that are still hard to discuss today, but looking back I see them as tests to my core and made me stronger and less naive to the world around me.

I’m doing this because I’m now ready to move forward and not hold my Alopecia as a burden but as a way for me to possibly encourage, help, and strengthen others around me with and without Alopecia. I want to use my differences to help others instead of always feeling like my main priority is to blend in and ignore my Alopecia, so here’s my site! Enjoy!